A History of Modern French Literature

by Christopher Prendergast

  OENONE: Hippolyte? Grands dieux!

  PHÈDRE:     C’est toi qui l’as nommé.

  (OENONE: Are you in love?

  PHÈDRE: I have love’s total fury.

  OENONE: For whom?

  PHÈDRE: Now you will hear the peak of horrors.

  I love—at that fatal name, I am cold, I quake—

  I love—

  OENONE: Whom?

  PHÈDRE: You know that son of the Amazon,

  That prince so long, now, by myself oppressed?

  OENONE: Hippolytus? Great Gods!

  PHÈDRE: It was you that named him.)

  Racine did not invent this passage: Euripides had already shown his Phaedra tip-toeing around the feared name in just this way, and the last hemistich, arguably the most famous six syllables in all of French classical drama, is in fact lifted verbatim from a French predecessor’s version of the tragedy (Gabriel Gilbert’s Hippolyte). But Racine takes what he finds in tradition and spins it into a thematic web. There’s Phèdre’s confession to Hippolyte, which starts as a confession of love for his father—“Oui, Prince, je languis, je brûle pour Thésée” (Yes, Prince, I am burning, languishing for Theseus)—before veering disturbingly off-track in a way that leaves her interlocutor searching awkwardly for an innocent interpretation of her words. “Ah! Cruel, tu m’as trop entendue” (Ah, cruel, you have understood me too well), she says, making further denial impossible. And we should note that Hippolyte too struggles to speak of his own love for the pure Aricie—once before his tutor, Théramène; again before Aricie herself; and a third time before his father. On the whole, he does a more direct job than his stepmother, but like her, he cannot quite come out with everything that must be said. His last words to his father, who has just accused him of lust for his stepmother, are a masterpiece of innuendo.

  Vous me parlez toujours d’inceste et d’adultère?

  Je me tais. Cependant Phèdre sort d’une mère,

  Phèdre est d’un sang, Seigneur, vous le savez trop bien,

  De toutes ces horreurs plus rempli que le mien.

  (You speak still of adultery and incest?

  I will not reply. Yet as her mother’s child

  Phaedra is of a blood, you know too well,

  More plentiful in all those horrors than mine.)

  Obliquity ends up finding its mark once again, and a furious Thésée is immediately spurred to request Neptune’s intercession. The king’s invocation of the god is as confident and spontaneous as the other protagonists’ avowals have been indecisive. But if Thésée is the only one here to speak with authority, it does not buy him anything more than stammering gets the others. The tragedy of speaking is universal.

  “Racinian characters are never lower on the scale of human grandeur than when they are moved to make a rational argument,” wrote Paul Bénichou in a classic analysis, meaning that their attempts at reasoning with others are usually but thin rationalizations, barely keeping a lid on the craziness boiling underneath. This is in direct contradistinction to the heroes of Racine’s elder rival Pierre Corneille—heroes who both know what they want and possess the rhetorical know-how to advocate for it. Corneille’s protagonists like to use the first-person pronoun, often coupled with words such as “want” or “must”; their will is in synch with their acts, and it is always and endlessly declared. Corneille’s choice was an innovation: resisting his contemporaries’ Aristotelian love of so-called recognition plots, where the poet retains crucial bits of information from both characters and audience until the climax (Jocasta is Oedipus’s mother!), Corneille reasoned that such bursts of surprise could produce pleasure only once and not on repeat viewings. Instead, it was the sustained dilemma facing characters who evaluate head-on all their irreconcilable options that produced real tragic emotion. The audience participated in this dilemma, and then took pleasure in the hero’s resolution of it—a pleasure he termed admiration.

  Not knowing just what one should say, or saying more than one intends, clues us into a break with Cornelian heroism and by extension with an entire conception of tragedy. Racine’s heroes didn’t behave heroically. They were, in a word, “natural.” And this word was used very early on to qualify Racine’s work—used by the playwright himself, by his supporters, and even by his detractors. Detractors said: legendary heroes had their own nature, they weren’t like us; and at any rate, tainting heroic subject matter with more mediocre motivations (such as love) could only, by definition, destroy the elevated dignity that tragedy depended on. Defenders, meanwhile, reasoned that Racine was doing just what he said, which was aiming for the very Aristotelian effects of “horror and pity,” produced when bad things happen to decent (but not perfect) people, and that the audience’s pleasure depended on a kind of commonality between viewers and characters.

  Such insistence on Racine’s naturalness may seem strange given what is surely the governing modern commonplace about French classical theater—its extreme artifice, its ascetic devotion to decorum, its elimination of anything that breathes. But it’s our modern commonplace that is strange. For their part, seventeenth-century theorists of the stage, who did indeed propose and parse rules for dramatic production, did so to enhance the believability of the spectacle. When one went to the theater, the experience was ideally felt to be that of finding oneself before the actual people portrayed—in our case, Theseus and his unhappy family. Thus theorists continually tried to jettison practices felt to be overly artificial and consequently destructive of the spectator’s illusion of experiencing the reality depicted. For example, anyone with a passing knowledge of French classicism recognizes “No blood on stage” as one of its cardinal rules. From there we extrapolate the squeamishness of an upper-class audience unwilling to be shocked by representations of violence, cocooned in their denial of reality itself. In fact, theorists offered a number of sometimes contradictory justifications for the proscription against spilling blood on stage, and a major one, lifted from Italian Renaissance theory, was simply that represented violence was unconvincing and thus ridiculous. Likewise, the three famous “unities”—of time, place, and action—were commonly justified not as tools to stifle the eruption of anything arbitrary or unplanned, but as necessities of illusion: a spectator transported between acts from France to Denmark would be so cognitively disturbed that the dramatic spell would be broken; ideally, some maintained, a play should even be in “real time.”

  So when words stick in Phèdre’s throat, they do so as part of this larger quest for characters we can believe in. The way dramatic characters should be made to speak was the object of considerable thought at the time. The earliest French tragedies, from the second half of the sixteenth century, were made up largely of lamentations—extended feats of eloquence in which characters bemoaned cruel fate. (Not created for the professional stage, which did not exist yet in France, such works obeyed the conventions of poetic practice more than those of drama.) Much critical energy was expended in the following century to distance tragedy from anything that smacked of the rhetorical arts. Speech was pushed to be less flowery and overtly sententious: extended metaphors and comparisons, everywhere in Renaissance tragedies, became unwelcome markers of the poet’s voice; and playwrights were warned to instruct through the drama itself, not by filling characters’ mouths with maxims. Monologues and asides, meanwhile, needed to be deployed judiciously and motivated by the circumstances of the play, lest we feel their artifice. A common thread runs through these observations and others: poetic eloquence moves us, but it is at the same time the enemy of feeling, because people who are truly in the grip of passion simply don’t talk like poets. On the contrary, real emotion may well be anything but wordy: “Often true passions, when really intense, remain mute, or are expressed confusedly.”

  Such was the observation of Hiliare-Bernard de Longepierre, the first to attempt the soon-to-be-unavoidable comparison between Corneille and Racine. And on the matter of emotional speech, which was for Longepierre the only ma
tter that counted, Racine won hands down. Some brute statistics, drawn from the work of Sabine Chaouche, hint at how this effect was achieved. In Corneille’s generation, plays were made up of approximately 86 percent affirmative declarations, 3.5 percent exclamations, and 11 percent questions. In Racine’s mature plays (Andromaque to Phèdre), the numbers are 77 percent, 4.5 percent, and 18.5 percent. Measurably, then, Phèdre belongs to a larger family of characters who are not sure of themselves. (One monologue in Bérénice [1670] consists of 64 percent interrogations; another, in Bajazet [1672], tops out at 73 percent.) Similarly, the playwright uses about three times the number of interjections (“Ah!”) as his rival Corneille. And another scholar, Marie-Lynn Flowers, has calculated that Racine’s sentences are roughly half as long as those of his contemporaries—both easier to follow, therefore, and less obviously rhetorical constructions. Those sentences, meanwhile, are often left unfinished, as characters trail off or are interrupted. The technical name for the device is aposiopesis, and it is indeed a device, a poetical “figure.” But unlike a figure such as reversion—ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country—it is designed to be self-effacing.

  Self-effacing: that is, pointing not to the words, not even to the words’ “meaning,” but to what the words cannot say, to the hidden passion that cannot talk straight. Words here are not a window onto the soul; they are the emergent part of the human iceberg. It used to be that the period scholars now commonly call early modern (roughly 1500 to 1750) was held to demonstrate the triumph of the individual—a moment in which, in Jacob Burckhardt’s pioneering formulation, man was no longer “conscious of himself only as member of a race, people, party, family, or corporation,” but became instead “complete,” which is to say, cosmopolitan and of universal aspirations. Lately, and in part under the influence of Michel Foucault, scholars have taken to speaking of the early modern constitution of a rather less resplendent being, a “deep” individual whose inner recesses became the object of scrutiny, much of it hostile. For Foucault, sex was at the root of this transformation, that is, sex seen no longer as a practice subject to variation and modification, but as an identity, a secret bent that defines each of us and that we are urged to confess, be it to priest, psychoanalyst, or talk-show host. Racine’s theater in particular seems of a piece with such a development: in it, amorous passion, shorn of chivalric and Neoplatonic nobility, becomes something more like an instinct, something that you are not responsible for, that you cannot master, and that gets in the way of everything else you should be doing. And something that, at least in Phèdre, as Foucault predicts, you want desperately to confess, so as to, again, “Rend[re] au jour … toute sa pureté” (give back to the light … its purity).

  Of course, all manner of uncontrollable lust had spilled onto the tragic stage before Racine. It was, however, safely quarantined within reprehensible characters—bad examples, or more accurately negative exemplars, whom we could look upon in moral horror, and who in any event had little trouble articulating the evil in their breast. (“How archaic a character like Edmund in King Lear sounds, with his unmediated access to his own wickedness,” writes the critic Thomas Pavel.) Racine’s instinctually driven protagonists, by contrast, and in the parlance of today’s undergraduates, are “relatable”: even the unalloyed tyrant Nero is depicted, in Britannicus, on the cusp of his passage over to the dark side, so that we can still feel his obsessive love for the young Junie as, well, something like love. Surely the power of a character like Phèdre—the way she takes over a myth in which she was originally but one player among many—owes a lot to Racine’s ability to let us see things from her point of view. If many readers have come away with the feeling that hostile fate is to blame for Phèdre’s woes, only part of this comes from our preconceptions about tragic destiny: the rest is the result of the persuasive intensity the playwright has brought to the case the protagonist makes for her helplessness.

  Racine was not alone in seeking to craft characters whose manifest imperfections do not inhibit but in fact encourage the development of what was at the time called pity, compassion, or interest, and what at least resembles—I will come back to this—what we now call identification. Indeed, his tragedies are part of a broader generational shift, and the passage from Corneille to Racine in tragedy resembles what we can observe in the domain of the novel. Madeleine de Scudéry, a contemporary of Corneille, was the most celebrated novelist of the 1640s and 1650s; her episodic, multivolume works, called heroic romances, were full of willful characters whose walk matched their talk. The Comtesse de Lafayette, who came on the literary scene just as this brand of heroic romance was going out of style in the early 1660s, played Racine to Scudéry’s Corneille. Lafayette’s novels—her enduringly famous Princesse de Clèves (The Princess of Clèves, 1678) but also her unjustly forgotten Zayde (1670–71)—were full of characters struggling, sometimes successfully, often not, to bring their unruly passions into line. Moreover, her readers reported many of the same effects that Racine’s commentators described, foremost a particular sort of bonding with beings whose predicaments had some measure of conformity with their own. Even the revolution in comedy wrought by Molière can arguably be understood in this context—as an attempt not only to put contemporary society and its ridicules on stage, but also to invent characters whose comic blindness and obstinacy do not keep us from partially viewing the world through their eyes. (The best example, though not the only one, is Le misanthrope’s Alceste, praised by a critic of the time, Donneau de Visé, as a creation that was both “to some extent ridiculous” and yet also able to “say quite sensible things.”)

  One frequent interpretation of this shift in what was valued in a literary character is loosely sociological: the new breed of unhappy heroes is a sign of the political pessimism of the aristocracy in the 1660s and 1670s. The Fronde, the midcentury revolt against the authority of Louis XIV’s regent, Anne d’Autriche, and her minister, Mazarin, had sources in both the new aristocracy of the robe (essentially legal professionals) and the landed aristocracy of the sword; the eventual crushing of the Fronde, and subsequent solidification of Louis XIV’s absolutist rule starting with the death of Mazarin in 1661, deprived French nobles of their former independence and importance. Given such context, it is not hard to see why Cornelian heroism, focused on the military exploits of the highest nobility, would be replaced by the heroes of Racine, who have trouble doing much of anything against an increasingly tyrannical royal power, and who instead content themselves with the more mundane matters of the heart. There is probably much truth to this: why indeed would a dramatist bother to craft meditations on the intricacies of governance and war for an essentially disenfranchised audience?

  A second explanation for what Bénichou called the “destruction of the hero” finds a cause in Jansenism and its deep spiritual pessimism: for some critics, the doctrine can be detected not only in Racine, who as a child actually attended the famous Jansenist school at Port-Royal, but also in the work of people whose biographical links to the sect are more tenuous—in La Princesse de Clèves, but also in the Maximes (Maxims, 1665) of Lafayette’s friend the Duc de La Rochefoucauld. Yet studying what actual readers of the period said they liked in Racine and Lafayette reveals something other than an interest in the condemnation of fallen humankind and its uncontrollable passions. If readers did not want characters to admire, this was because people could not simply do what they decided, for all the right reasons, to do: the human heart was a recess of unknowable desires and motivations, and the writer’s task was to open up that interiority. Longepierre thus describes the heart as Racine’s true subject, which was putty in his hands: “He manipulates it as he wishes, he unfolds its every crease, he sounds its deepest point; he pierces its twists and turns, and not one corner of this dark and impenetrable labyrinth escapes his penetration.” Yet in virtually the same breath, Longepierre expands enthusiastically on the pleasure Racine’s audience takes in the display of a heart th
at is not so much devious and vice-ridden as beatingly alive before us, a swirling locus of emotions—“faintness, ardor, transport, fear, ruse, artifice, anxiety, anger, languor, delicacy, and more.” If it was indeed Racine’s intention to offer his audience a sour mirror in which to recognize their own sinful nature, he would seem to have failed: notwithstanding its destructiveness, passion here is described as completely seductive. Love, not simply a prime subject of Racine’s tragedies, ends up being something like the feeling that passes between audience and characters: “How can a heart that recognizes its own image in these animated and lively portraits not be touched by them? It is thus that [the viewer’s heart] has no power to resist.” In such phrases, Longepierre goes well beyond the traditional Aristotelian language of pity to stress the identificatory bond between viewer and character.

  Identification may be well and good in novels and comedy, one might allow; but how can it be compatible with tragedy—a genre that, like epic, is almost by definition peopled with larger-than-life legends, men and women occupying the highest reaches of political and military power? The objection is sound, at least historically, for it goes back to Racine’s detractors at the time. But this was what Racine took as his challenge—to stretch the bounds of tragedy, to open it to the values that someone like Longepierre articulates, while at the same time keeping it truly tragic. And the formula he would exploit was to make passion itself tragic. That is, it was not that the personal and the political were tragically opposed, that heroic aspirations were pitted against the heart’s siren call. This was more or less Corneille’s formula, one that inevitably made love subordinate to what the dramatist called the “male” passions of ambition and revenge. Racine’s approach, by contrast, was to make amorous passion unruly, destructive, something that we might want to call not so much by the noble name of “love” but by the more pathological term “desire.” Desire did not stand in a tragic face-off with the masculine political passions; rather, it infected everything, to the point where any action, no matter how rational the alibi, always had it as its secret wellspring. There wasn’t hard action on the one hand and soft love on the other—a dialectic that epics from the Odyssey and the Aeneid to Torquato Tasso’s Jerusalem Delivered (1581) had consecrated by thematizing heroism’s resistance to erotic temptation. There was simply this consuming desire, which served as a perverse and universal human motivator. Such was modern tragedy for Racine: a tragedy his audience could relate to.